The Book

“The Art of Manufacturing” is intended to be used in an introductory course in Manufacturing Engineering. The typical student will be a first year engineering student at a 4 year university.

Throughout the text I draw on knowledge gained from over twenty years of experience researching and teaching about advanced manufacturing tools and technology combined with my experience consulting for both large and small manufacturing companies. We will deal with materials from well-established reference manuals as well as cutting edge research presented in new works in the scientific literature.

The text intends to introduce important concepts in Manufacturing, Manufacturing Engineering, and the Science of Manufacturing.A wise man once said “Engineers don’t need to know anything; they just need to know what book to look in.” I’m not quite willing to admit that knowing which book to look in is the only thing an engineer needs to know, but it is certainly one of the most important things you will learn as you train to become and then work as an engineer. I have found that in addition to having access to a great library, the best engineers are the ones who have a grasp of the underlying physics of the problem they are trying to solve.

If you stipulate that knowing which book to look in is important to solving many engineering problems the question you need to ask is: How you know what book to look in, how you find the information that you need once you have found the book, and finally how do you extrapolate or interpolate to find the answer to your question?